TARGETED RECOVERY: I only need to recover 350Mb worth of data / only need one folder... Shouldn't it be a lot less money?

Our Answer:

It is possible to drive the cost down by limiting recovery to specific data, BUT, in over 85% of cases, the storage capacity of your hard drive (not so much the amount of critical data you want back) is one of the major factors that determine the cost of data recovery; you can easily imagine how it would take much less time to find "a ball of wax" in a bucket, as compared to finding it in a barn.

When inactive data is being recovered, a typical recovery operation must first recover and rebuild the directory tree structure which can be visualized like a vast system of shelf spaces. Then, proceeding through the storage space in a sequential manner, each successive sector of data, one-by-one, is placed on or assigned to its proper shelf, and thereby accumulated to the proper file.

Often, we can't know exactly what has been recovered until after most of the recovery work has been completed. Targeting specific data requires additional lab time to cull through recovered data. It is typically far more efficient for the client to perform this filtering, since they are much more familiar with their own files.

To minimize mechanical activity (and thus speed response for the user), HDs are designed to store your data across multiple heads/platters; also, over time, repeated editing, deleting, adding new files, etc., causes your data to become very interspersed in terms of the physical locations where file contents are recorded.

In certain cases it can takes longer to find no data (nothing) as the opposite, (have you noticed how much more time you spend looking to find your brand of toothpaste at the store - when it's NOT there?) because the recovery engineer must identify and use every possible permutation of the search target.